Interviews

1.5.3.1 Place and Time

The main part of the fieldwork – taking interviews - was fulfilled in Tromsø in February and March 2013, in other words, during the weeks directly following the celebration of the Sami National Day. I had chosen this period for conducting interviews on purpose: the events, impressions and thoughts about Sami Day were fresh in the memory of the informants, and what is more important for the research – their perception of Sami Day was not influenced by my questions. (This means the informants – who knew nothing about my project at that time – celebrated the Sami National Day and observed the events in the same natural way they had always celebrated, having no thoughts in the back of their minds about their participation in the celebration.)

As all the informants were in one way or another related to the University of Tromsø, most of the interviews were conducted on the University campus. Taking into consideration that fact that the fieldwork was fulfilled in the middle of semester, and the campus was full of students and other visitors, I tried to arrange places and times for the interviews to be conducted in such a way that they would not to be disturbed by others: some interviews were taken in the offices, some in the reading rooms, some in the library, and coffee bars in those hours when they were almost empty.

1.5.3.2 Informant Groups

To see the researched issue from different angles at the beginning of my fieldwork I planned to interview three groups of informants: Sami living in Tromsø, Norwegians living in Tromsø, and foreigners living in Tromsø. The first group represented insiders and their point of view on the celebration of the Sami National Day. The second and the third groups represented outsiders and their point of view on the researched issue. The outsiders were of two different kinds:

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Norwegians are outsiders towards the Sami community, but as they live in the same country as the researched people and the territory of the country is rather small (as compared to my home country, Russia), it nearly goes without saying that all of them are aware of the existence, location, main livelihoods, and culture of the Sami people;

The word “foreigners” refers to those informants that came to Norway from other countries. They are outsiders to the Sami community as well, and their difference from the Norwegians is that very few of them had known about the Sami people before they arrived to Tromsø.

Therefore at the beginning of my fieldwork the informant groups looked this way:

Fig.2 Informant Groups 1

But when conducting the fieldwork I realized that the range of informants was rather larger than the groups presented above. There appeared to be - as I call it – a transition group, the group between “insiders” and “outsiders” representing those informants that are not Sami by their origin but belong to the Sami community (I discuss the case in detail in Chapter 3, Section 3.5).

It appeared to be reasonable to divide “insiders” into age groups: the younger generation (from 25 to 40 years old), those who started school or were school children at the time the Sami National Day began being celebrated; the middle generation (from 40 to 50 years old), those who started university or were students at the time Sami Day began being celebrated; and the older generation (from 50 years old), those informants that were mature at the time Sami Day began being celebrated and took an active part in the Sami movement at that time. I should note that in the presented age groups I do not follow any scientific age classification. I divide my informants into these groups on the basis of the empirical material I obtained during the fieldwork aiming to conduct the analysis of the material more thoroughly.

The presented age division helps me to reconstruct the way the Sami National Day was celebrated at the beginning of the 1990s and the way it is celebrated nowadays. Moreover, it is very helpful in analyzing and explaining the differences in the answers of my informants

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concerning the same time period. As the results of the analysis of the interviews show, it appeared to be rather difficult for some informants to remember the details concerning the celebration of the Sami National Day twenty years ago.

Moreover, I divided the group “foreigners” into European - those who live in European countries, in other words, neighbouring countries to Norway, and have much better access to the information about Norway and its people, and foreigners living in countries rather distant from Norway who are represented in the group non- European.

Furthermore, to make the analysis more precise, I divided all the outsiders into “those who have been living in Tromsø less than two years” and “those who have been living in the city for a longer period”.

I then divided all the outsiders into indigenous related and not related, as those informants that have some relations towards indigenous studies appeared to be more observant and receptive in terms of watching and analyzing things concerning the celebration of the Sami National Day in Tromsø. Under the word combination indigenous related I mean those informants that are indigenous by their origin and/or are related to indigenous studies due to their professional interests.

By the end of the fieldwork the informant groups appeared this way:

Fig.3 Informant Groups 2

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One may wonder why I use such broad definitions for my informants. The answer is simple: Tromsø is a rather small city, its Sami community is even smaller, and as all of my informants are related to the university, it can become too easy to identify them if I give further details about their personalities. Why do I try to protect my informants’ identity? The answer is also simple: in the thesis I investigate the identity of an indigenous people by learning my informants’ personal opinions about the researched issue, so the topic of my research work is too sensitive to reveal the names of my informants publically. This is why I present them anonymously, as numbers, but in the text noting details concerning their personalities that are important for understanding their points of view, and in the supplement to the thesis giving more details about their personalities in a form of a table.

1.5.3.3 Overview of the Taken Interviews

During the fieldwork I took 22 interviews, 20 anonymous and 2 official. Among the anonymous informants I interviewed 6 insiders, 1 representative of the transition group, and 13 outsiders (6 Norwegians and 7 foreigners). I did not try to take the same number of male and female informants as, from my point of view, gender does not play a vital role in the research.

The officials I interviewed were Ivar Bjørklund, a founder of the exhibition “Sápmi – Becoming a Nation” at the University Museum of Tromsø, and Else Grete Broderstad, the academic director of the Center for Sami Studies at the University of Tromsø who has been working at the Center for more than 20 years started as an administrative director in 1992 (Broderstad 2013 [interview]).

The duration of the interviews varied from 10 minutes to 90 minutes. When I started conducting interviews it looked like the outsiders had a little to say about the discussed issues (and the interviews took only 10-15 minutes) and the insiders had much to tell me (the interviews took 40-50 minutes), but then the situation turned around: interviews with some insiders took only about 10 minutes and interviews with some outsiders took up to 90 minutes.

What I would also like to note here is that in the short interviews (10-15 minutes) the informants and I spoke in equal turns, but in the longer interviews (40-50 minutes) my informants spoke more prevalently.

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